6 Creative Uses For Grandma's Old Buttons

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Over the Australian Day long weekend, my family and I took a visit to The Vintage Shed in Tyabb; a treasure trove of vintage delights situated on the Mornington Peninsula. Its name may suggest a small shop, but The Vintage Shed is a warehouse filled with over 60 stallholders selling vintage and retro furniture, memorabilia, toys, trunks, clothes, paintings, cameras, sewing patterns, and more.

:: The Vintage Shed ::

A collection of rings caught my eye, particularly as I'd noticed they were made using vintage buttons:

:: Vintage Button Rings ::

Making vintage button rings would be a super cheap and easy DIY project to do at home by attaching buttons to a ring base with glue. Vintage buttons are easy to come by, detached from old clothes and found in thrift stores. Imagine instead using buttons from your Grandma's collection? A simple vintage button ring could become a sentimental piece of jewellery.

Vintage buttons can be added to fashion pieces as decorative pieces and work well in craft projects. Here are other some other creative uses for Grandma's old buttons that you could try out if you are so inclined:

1. Crazy Button Vest

This is one of my own projects, sewing buttons onto the lapel of a thrifted waistcoat, inspired by a button vest seen on instagram. More here.

A vintage button bouquet would make be a wonderful wedding keepsake for a bride, particularly if some of her Grandma's buttons were used in the design. Perhaps not as easy to make yourself, although there are companies that specialise in crafting button bouquets such as the one seen above made by Love is Vintage.

Jazz up a pair of otherwise boring shoes with vintage button accessories. These could be glued directly onto the shoe, or made into shoe clips. The button shoe accessories seen in the image above was found on beadandcord.

6. Button Art

There are hundred's of ways to use vintage buttons in artistic pieces. This particular hummingbird picture seen above is a personal favourite, made by BellePapiers.

Readers, do you have further suggestions for creative ways in which vintage buttons can be used?

9 comments:

I worked on this for months, using modern buttons, vintage buttons, and BBs (of all things) to fill in some of the blank spots - http://scrapstitching.blogspot.com/2013/09/button-art-mannequin-is-done-or-what-i.html

What a great post! I was given a HUGE tin (size of a hatbox) full of buttons, and I've been sorting them into colours for about a year, but don't seem to be getting far, even with the occasional help of friends! I use mine mostly to embellish patchwork and embroidery projects, but these only use a few buttons at a time. One project I saw online appealed to me, and I've done two of them, is using the supermarket 'green' bags, I sew a piece (or pieces) of fabric on the front, and then sew multiple buttons on top of that, and it really dresses those bags up. Gets a lot of comments from the checkout girls too.

The rings don't appeal to me, nor do fridge magnets, but I love the vest and the hummingbird, which reminded me of another thing I saw online: a map of the USA made entirely of buttons - a different colour button for each state (colours repeated of course, bearing in mind there are 50 states, and only so many colours!). But one day I'd like to do a similar button project using a map of Australia.